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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,436

A Historical Epidemic Has Been Making a Scary Comeback Due to a Bacterial ‘Clone’

Once a leading cause of death for children across the western world, scarlet fever was nearly eradicated thanks to 20th century medicine. But fresh outbreaks in the UK and North East Asia over recent years suggest we’ve still got a long way to go.

Just why we’re experiencing a resurgence of the deadly pathogen is a mystery. A new study has uncovered clues in the genome of one of the bacterial strains responsible, showing just how complex the family tree of infectious diseases can be.

The species behind the illness is group A strep, or Streptococcus pyogenes; a ball-shaped microbe that can churn out toxic compounds called superantigens, capable of wreaking havoc inside the body. Especially in children.

Some Fish Can Regenerate Their Eyes. Turns Out, Mammals Have Those Genes Too

Perhaps in the future, gene editing may allow retinal regeneration in humans to reverse age-related vision deterioration.

Damage to the retina is the leading cause of blindness in humans, affecting millions of people around the world. Unfortunately, the retina is one of the few tissues we humans can’t grow back.

Unlike us, other animals such as zebrafish are able to regenerate this tissue that’s so crucial to our power of sight. We share 70 percent of our genes with these tiny little zebrafish, and scientists have just discovered some of the shared genes include the ones that grant zebrafish the ability to grow back their retinas.

“Regeneration seems to be the default status, and the loss of that ability happened at multiple points on the evolutionary tree,” said Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Seth Blackshaw.

An HIV-fighting strategy might help against COVID-19

Vaccines could take years, and preventative drugs could help bridge the gap.

Though many people are pinning their hopes on a COVID-19 vaccine, another option is available: preventive treatment. At a Senate hearing this week, Anthony Fauci noted that a vaccine — which is probably months or years away — isn’t the only way to protect someone from a life-threatening virus.

These treatments could protect people against infection for a few weeks or months, said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. While most ongoing research studies are focused on finding treatments for people who are already sick with COVID-19, some researchers are looking to see if they can stop people who are at high risk from getting sick in the first place.

It’s a proven strategy: preventive drugs have been used for decades to help people protect themselves against malaria. More recently, they were a breakthrough in the fight against HIV. There’s no effective vaccine against HIV, but people can take a daily medication that reduces their risk of contracting it through sexual activity by 99 percent. The medication is a pre-exposure prophylactic, or PrEP — a drug used to prevent disease in people who haven’t yet been exposed to it.

Surviving Corona — A Warning: Facts, Fakery, and Hope for the Future

In this brief, at times controversial— even radical—volume. Dr. Ian C. Hale guides us through likely scenarios and gives us life-saving recommendations for effectively dealing with the next waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a must read for public policy makers, medical professionals, and those mapping out their financial future in the post-corona world.

Volcanic eruption turned man’s brain into glass, ‘froze’ brain cells 2,000 years ago, scientists find

Although it’s clearly NOT the approach taken for ultracold vitrification of patients undergoing life extension cryonization. (ULTRA🥶COLD being the exact opposite of ULTRA-BLOODY-H🥵T, obviously!)

Still, given the vast number of scientific and engineering discoveries and creations born on the backs of unexpected results, accidental discoveries, and outright screw up, it might have very useful data that has practical applications that would never otherwise have even been considered.

Italian scientists found intact brain cells in a man who was killed during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

‘Re-writing the code of life’: Nobel chemistry prize goes to genome editing pioneers

The genetic editing technique has contributed to new cancer therapies and has the potential to be used in curing inheritable diseases.

Two women were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for their pioneering work on genome editing, which has the life-saving potential to be used to cure genetic diseases.el Prize in chemistry Wednesday for their pioneering work on genome editing, which has the life-saving potential to be used to cure genetic diseases.el Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing a method for genome editing that could be used to cure many diseases.

Remote control of blood sugar: Electromagnetic fields treat diabetes in animal models

Researchers from the University of Iowa may have discovered a safe new way to manage blood sugar non-invasively. Exposing diabetic mice to a combination of static electric and magnetic fields for a few hours per day normalizes two major hallmarks of type 2 diabetes, according to new findings published Oct. 6 in Cell Metabolism.

“We’ve built a remote control to manage diabetes,” says Calvin Carter, Ph.D., one of the study’s lead authors and a postdoc in the lab of senior author Val Sheffield, MD, Ph.D., professor of pediatrics, and of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the UI Carver College of Medicine. “Exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) for relatively short periods reduces and normalizes the body’s response to insulin. The effects are long-lasting, opening the possibility of an EMF therapy that can be applied during sleep to manage diabetes all day.”

The unexpected and surprising discovery may have major implications in diabetes care, particularly for patients who find current treatment regimens cumbersome.

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